Ask HN: Alternative to Go
With all the Go skeptics around on HN (not judging, just an observation), there must be a wealth of knowledge about similar (but "better") languages.
What I like about Go is: - excellent standard and public libraries - fast compile times (hot reloading is awesome) - easy distribution by cross compiling binaries that have no dependencies
Is there anything that has similar developer ergonomics as Go?
21 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadMicrosoft also appears to be working towards support for gui support for macOS and linux.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-multi-...
I suspect that given that it's Microsoft if it works it'll just work.
https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
https://github.com/AvaloniaCommunity/Avalonia.FuncUI
The standard libraries + community are larger than Go, you can find a library to do anything. Standard library is huge and mostly great.
Compilation time is a couple seconds even for huge projects. You can do automatic reloads using Gradle.
Its very cross platform, including one of the only good cross platform desktop UI's.
You can build smaller binary distributions using JLink or a multitude of third party tools.
Single binaries are overrated. Any app that's widely distributed uses an installer or package management anyways (brew,choco,apt)
"Single binaries are overrated. Any app that's widely distributed uses an installer [...]"
That's true once you have the kind of traction where distro maintainers are going to consider packaging it themselves. But to attain that kind of popularity having a stand-alone binary is going to make a huge difference.
Unless you're willing to build all those packages/installers from scratch!
Currently I make an 'uberjar' that includes all java dependencies including Tomcat/Jetty/etc: java -jar my-app.jar
What's annoying is finding the desired JDK/JRE for each OS with the right license and manually installing it. Sometimes having to make some file fixes (e.g. OpenJ9 JDK & Maven compatibility).
Single binaries are easier to install and maintain even if you have to maintain an installer.
I prefer F# but is trickier to set up and less well used/documented/discussed. OCaml might fit the bill.
F# works great for GUIs. Startet that project about a year ago and it’s gaining traction. Not sure if something like this exists for OCaml ? (If so please let me know - would love to give it a shot)
https://github.com/AvaloniaCommunity/Avalonia.FuncUI
Could be an alternative.
In the past few days, I've been playing around with Kotlin because a client of mine is wanting an Android app developed, so I figure this is a good opportunity to dive right in. I have experience with Spring Java as well, not as the primary dev of the project, but I've written enough code to be comfortable with the process.
After being impressed with the process of writing Android apps in Kotlin, I decided to jump into Spring Boot + Kotlin and have been nothing but impressed. It's certainly different, but I'm feeling more productive than I was in Go because I can't say there is anything quite like it available in Go. I've tried Buffalo, but kept running into issues, and my typical go-to stack is Echo for the framework and Gorm for the MySQL library, but even then I need to pick my own tools for auth and caching.
The build time is certainly something to be desired, but with one of the more basic apps I'm writing for a client right now, it takes just a few seconds to compile, so it's certainly nothing to complain about at this point.
This is the tutorial I initially followed: https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/spring-boot-kotlin/ and swapping out the h2 database for mysql was pretty straightforward, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was able to have the app automatically set up the DB structure for me, similar to how AutoMigrate works with gorm.